Plot
In the story, Ivan Shponka is a young man who is not very bright but attends to his affairs better than anyone. He was made as the monitor in his class when young though there were some much better than he, and won the affection of one of the most feared teachers at school. He finally finishes the second class (sixth grade approximately) at fifteen, and goes on to the military after two more years of school, retiring as a lieutenant.
He gets a letter from his aunt that he needs to come home to become master of his farm and sets off for Gadyach. On the way, at an inn, he meets the fat landowner Grigory Grigoriviech, who says he lives near Ivan’s farm and asks him to come visit when he gets there. The man is pushy and frequently orders around his Cossack servant boy. When Ivan arrives there he finds his aunt in incredible health, almost so man-like that she is hardly a woman. He begins to take over some of the duties of the farm.
Gogol’s descriptions of the scenery here are very rich and beautiful and the mowing segment seems to have likely influenced Tolstoy while writing Anna Karenina (also including a mowing scene with Levin that is strikingly similar). Ivan learns from his aunt that 60 acres (240,000 m2) nearby are rightfully his, being held by Grigory. He goes to visit him but the man denies the existence of a will written by his father detailing the matter, so they have dinner and Ivan meets his daughters. When he tells his aunt of the one daughter, she begins to become obsessed about him getting married to her and his chores begin to decline somewhat.
They visit there together but Ivan says little to her when alone other than mentioning the house flies during the time of year. When he goes home, that night, he has a terrible nightmare about marriage and Gogol gives the reader some truly modern scenes that display his ability to portray the grotesque. A shopkeeper, for example, is selling “wives” as fabric and cuts one off for Ivan to wear. The story ends here mentioning a “next chapter” that does not exist.
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Read more about this topic: Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka And His Aunt
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)